by Ed Gorman
He stank of it the way frontier docs, according to legend, had stunk of John Barleycorn. His wife had died two years ago. He was sixty-four and had just started dating. There were a lot of gentle jokes about his love life.
“Now that’s one of those five-dollar words I hate to use,” he said, fiddling with his stethoscope. The only hospital in Black River Falls was a sixteen-bed affair. If you were very bad off, you went to Cedar Rapids; worse than that, you went to Iowa City. He peered down at Mary, asleep in her hospital bed. She’d been cleaned up but you could still see bruises. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock. So right now she’s not remembering too good.”
“But she didn’t even recognize me!”
Miriam said. She’d held back tears for quite a while now. It was 2ccjj A.M. and she was spent. She had a very sick husband at home and a daughter whose state had yet to be determined.
I slid my arm around her. She leaned against it, frail and weary.
“Again, Miriam, we don’t know what
happened. But obviously something pretty bad did. Amnesia, as they like to call it on television, comes in all kinds of forms. It rarely lasts very long. I expect in a day or two she’ll be saying hello to you when you walk into the room.”
“But where has she been? What happened to her?”
Miriam said.
Those were the questions of the evening. I’d brought her straight to the hospital. She’d slept most of the way. Not once had she shown any recognition of me. A couple of times, I wondered if she was still alive.
“As I told you, Miriam, there’s no sign of concussion. She has feeling in all her extremities. Her limbs are functioning well. And the bumps and scrapes she has are relatively minor. Cleaning them up made them look a lot less threatening. Her injuries mostly seem to be psychological. And there again, once she gets her physical strength back, she’ll be better able to deal with whatever happened to her.”
“Was she … raped?” Miriam asked, obviously dreading the answer.
“Not that we could tell.”
“I didn’t tell Bill about any of this,”
she said to me.
“Good,” I said.
“I’m not sure he could stand to hear it.”
I gave her another squeeze.
“Now, I recommend some bedrest for you too.
You’re nearly as worn out as your daughter. You need some sleep. And you also need some help around the house.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I’ve got a high school girl who plans to go to med school at the university. She helps out in my office ten hours a week. I pay her thirty-five cents an hour. She wants to get as much experience as she can. I’ll have her give you a call.”
“That’s very nice of you, doctor.”
He smiled. “Well, isn’t that what
doctors are supposed to be, Miriam?
Nice?”
On the way back home, she said, “She was going to tell you something.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I knew what it was.”
“So do I.”
She turned and looked at me. “I shouldn’t say this, Sam. But she loves you so much.”
The streets were empty. A rising wind whipped the streetlights around, casting shifting patterns of tree leaves on the street. The cars along the curb looked like slumbering animals. All the house windows were dark.
She said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine, Miriam. It’s fine. It’s just I don’t know what to say back.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s all right, Sam.”
“I keep wondering about that envelope from the county.”
“So do I. I don’t know why she’d write them. What would she be looking for?”
“I’ll have the Judge call over there,” I said. “The woman I spoke to didn’t want to wade back through all her correspondence.
That’s what she said, anyway. She was speaking to a peon so she didn’t have to worry. You know how bureaucrats are. But she won’t try that with the Judge.”
“Judge Whitney is some woman. I wish I could be more like her in some ways.”
I laughed. “Not all ways, huh?”
She smiled sadly. “No, I wouldn’t ever want to be as stuck-up as she is. You know, you think people are stuck-up sometimes just because they’re shy or because they’ve been hurt and they’re afraid to be hurt again. But with the Judge you know she’s stuck-up because she really does consider herself superior.”
“Oh, yes. Very much. Maybe it was all the Connecticut water she drank growing up.”
“Is there something wrong with Connecticut water?”
“Well, the longer you drink it,” I said, “the bigger your head seems to get. There must be a connection somewhere.”
The sad smile again.
When we reached her house, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a good man.”
“Thanks, Miriam.”
There were a lot of lies, social lies, I could have told just then but I didn’t have the spiritual energy. You know, that everything was going to be fine.
Mary would be fine. Bill would experience a miraculous recovery. And she’d open her bankbook and find an extra $100eajjj in her account, the angels having deposited it before fluttering their way back to heaven.
“Good night, Miriam.”
I returned her kiss. I started to get out of the car but she said, “I’m not quite that feeble yet, Sam.”
I watched her walk to the door. There were a lot of people like her in our town: good, solid, hardworking people who took care of their own. Her bad luck had bent her but it hadn’t beaten her. She moved slower than I’d ever seen her move before.
On the porch, after getting the front door open, she turned and waved back to me.
I went home.
Tv had long ago signed off. The Cedar Rapid stations never broadcast past midnight; often they went off after the eleven o’clock news. I was drained but not sleepy. I spent half an hour twisting the rabbit ears back and forth, trying to form pictures out of the noisy snow on my screen. I had a pair of rabbit ears that were the envy of Mrs. Goldman’s apartment house. They must have weighed twenty pounds and had more buttons and dials and doodads and doohickeys than most intergalactic spaceships. If you knew all the right codes and combinations, it would also mow your lawn and give milk. It was quite a rig. Most nights anyway. But not tonight. Every once in a while, an image would sort of form and I’d hear dialogue and get my hopes up, but then the signal would fade and there would just be snow again. I gave up. That’d be one of the nice things about living in Chicago. You could watch Tv all night.
I sat in my reading chair and drank a beer.
So many questions, including the identity of the girl in the black Ford ragtop. Would I have been in the right spot to find Mary if the mystery lady hadn’t challenged me to a race? Was she some kind of guardian angel? And Mary’s
amnesia. The doc was probably right.
Temporary amnesia was probably fairly common in accident victims. But it was still disturbing that she couldn’t recognize her own mother.
I picked up a John D. MacDonald
novel called Dead Low Tide. I’d
read it a couple of times before. I always came back to it. It made me feel better in the way saying a prayer made me feel better. The ritual of repetition. There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero.
He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be. I think that’s why John D.’s books are so popular.
Because we all know deep down we’re sort of jerks. Not all the time. But every once in a while we’re jerks and we have to face it and it’s never fun. You see how deeply you’ve hurt somebody, or how you were wrong about somebody, or how you let som
ebody down. But facing it makes you a better person. Because maybe next time you won’t be quite as petty or arrogant or cold.
Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without ever letting on. All this is according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as taught in lively and deft style by Dr. Harold Gelbman at the University of Iowa.
Forgive me. It was late at night and I was in a ruminative mood. Creak of old house.
Jet plane far above roaring into darkness, contrail across prairie moon. Needing to take a leak but too lazy to get up. Hungry but too tired to fix anything. Sleepy now but too comfortable to walk to bed. Dozing with one cat on my lap, one cat on the arm of the chair, and one cat sleeping on the back of the chair with her head resting on the top of my head. And snoring. Cats can snore pretty good when they’re up to it.
And then the phone rang.
It’s a measure of how deeply asleep I was that I jumped up as if I’d been poked. The cats jumped up, too, scattered quickly.
I was baffled for a moment, staring at a small black jangling instrument I’d never seen before.
I couldn’t imagine what its purpose was.
And then I snatched up the receiver.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello!”
“Mr. McCain?” Very faint.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. Ellie. Ellie …
Chalmers.”
“Hi, Ellie.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Just reading is all.”
Silence.
“Ellie?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“He’ll be mad if I do.”
“Who will?”
“My dad.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
“I’m just scared is all.”
“What happened?”
“Sykes came to where Dad works today and hauled him out in front of everybody. They pick on him a lot anyway, on account of he was in prison.”
“What happened?”
“Sat in the squad car and accused him over and over of killing the Squires woman and now Squires. A lot of the men would sneak up to the door and watch Sykes workin’ him over. It hurt Dad’s feelings. Now he says Sykes is gonna arrest him for sure.”
“So what’s your dad going to do?”
Long silence. “Run away.”
“That’s the worst thing he could do.”
“That’s what I keep tellin’ him.”
“He won’t get far.”
“He’s got money. Somebody was out here today and left a package for him.”
“You know who it was?”
“Uh-uh. There was just this big manila envelope on the doorstep. Dad’s name on it.
There wasn’t any stamp or anything.”
“How do you know it was money?”
“I saw Dad open it and put it in his suitcase.”
“What’s supposed to happen to you, he runs off like that?”
“He said to go see you. That you’re his lawyer now and you’d know what to do.”
“I’m on my way out.”
“I’d really appreciate it.”
“You just hold him there as long as you can.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I appreciate the call, Ellie. You
did the right thing.”
“He didn’t kill those people.”
“I know he didn’t, Ellie. I know he didn’t.”
Pale red fire bloomed in bursts against the dark moon-streaked sky. A war scene. It might have been night fighting in Korea.
When I reached the top of the hill looking down on Chalmers’s acreage, I saw the source of the pale red bursts: two police cruisers.
Because the house was isolated from its neighbors, there were no onlookers. A cop with a shotgun stood in front of the door. I pulled up.
“He ain’t gonna be happy to see you,”
Pat Jarvis said.
As far as I could tell, the only thing the Jarvis family had ever done, except butter up the priests, was produce a daughter with breasts so enormous even the withered monsignor could be seen eyeing them. Patrick had none of her charm.
“Chalmers got away, and Cliff, he
figures you had somethin’ to do with it.”
Nice going, Mike, I thought. Give
Cliffie an excuse to blow your ass off when he finally catches up with you.
“I go inside?”
“If I don’t shoot you in the back, you’ll know it’s Ok.”
“Very funny.”
A grin. “Ol’ Cliff’s pissed, and I
ain’t ki.in’.”
I went inside. He didn’t shoot me in the back.
Cliffie saw me and said, “I should plug you right here.”
“There’s a witness,” I said, nodding to Ellie. She wore a high school
sweatshirt, jeans, and white soiled sneakers without socks.
“You told him to do it, didn’t you?”
He lunged at me. His face was booze red.
His eyes were pretty much the same color.
“You really think I’d tell him to run? I’d lose my right to practice.”
“I gave shoot-to-kill orders, in case you’re interested.”
Ellie started crying.
“Great, Cliffie,” I said. “Why don’t you scare her some more? The guy’s only her father.”
I sat next to her in the old high-ceiling farm living room. There’d probably been a horsehair couch in here at one time, and a Windsor chair, and a soft Victorian kerosene lamp and a Victrola. There was an overhead light on now. Bare. Merciless. The charm of the place had long ago fled.
She stopped crying and just looked scared. “He wants to kill him.”
“No, he doesn’t. He just likes to talk.
Don’t you, Chief?” I was careful not to call him Cliffie. This wasn’t the time.
He glared at me. “She’s old enough to understand what he done.”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Yeah? And you can prove that?”
“Yeah, I can. I just need a few more hours.”
I had no idea what I was talking about. The point was to make Ellie feel better. She sat prim and proper, sort of gangly, and more than sort of sweet.
He looked at Ellie. “Well, I hope
for his sake she’s more cooperative with you than she was with me. It’d be a damn sight better if Chalmers turned hisself in instead of me findin’ him.”
He looked around the room again, rubbed his jaw, and then left. The emergency lights died. No red-soaked bursts of illumination in the front window anymore.
I lit a Lucky.
“Can I have one?”
“Technically, I shouldn’t do this, you know.”
“Aw, shit, Mr. McCain, just give me one, all right? I’ve been smoking for years.”
I gave her one. Lit it for her.
“He’s probably out at the old line
shack.” She told me where it was.
“I thought he was going to run away.”
“He said he wanted time to think.”
“You know, Cliffie’s going to put a tail on me. Everywhere I go, his tail will go. I go to the line shack, I’ll lead him right to your dad.”
She coughed on the cigarette.
“I thought you said you’d been smoking for
years.”
“Well, not steady, I didn’t say. I have to smoke a couple each time before I quit coughing.”
“Ah.”
“He wants to kill him. Cliffie, I
mean.”
“He wants to kill anybody he even
suspects is a criminal. And that means just about everybody.”
“Is his old man as stupid as he is?”
“Just about.”
“How’d he make all that money, then?”
I could tell she was enjoying this little respite from worrying about her father.
“Right time, right place. He had a local construction company. When the Sykeses took over, Cliffie applied for the Chief’s job.”
“So Old Man Sykes stepped in?”
“So Old Man Sykes appointed him.”
Then: “How long do you think your dad’ll be at the line shack?”
“Probably all night.”
“You plan on going there?”
“He told me not to.”
“Then don’t.”
“You think Cliffie’ll kill him?”
“No. I’ll see to that.”
“Really?” She coughed.
“Really. And meanwhile, why don’t you give up the cigarettes?”
“I will if you will.”
I smiled and kissed her on the forehead.
“Whatever happened to respect for your elders?”
Cliffie’s tail was even more amateurish than I’d expected. He followed me about half a car length back. The car was unmarked, true, but the man was in his police uniform. One sort of canceled out the other.
I was thinking about Dr. Todd Jensen. I’d been wanting to talk to him anyway. Now I wanted to talk to him as soon as possible, which meant early morning. His past with Susan Squires had always been murky. I needed to know about it in detail now, especially since he’d been identified as one of the people at Dick Keys’s garage the other night.
Bed.
All three cats piled near my
feet.
No trouble sleeping. Except that every time I moved, one or two of them meowed in protest. It was Ok for them to move, you understand, but not for me.
They have that written in their contract.
I was standing outside the good doctor’s door at eight o’clock, exactly fifteen minutes before his nurse arrived. She still didn’t look as if she found me much of an improvement over a leper.
“He isn’t in.”
“I’ll wait.”
I sat in the reception room and went through all the boring magazines. She made coffee. She didn’t offer me any. We both kept looking at the clock on the wall to her left.
I said, “If I give you a dime, can I have a cup of coffee?”
“A quarter.”
“Hell, I can go down to the corner and get a cup of coffee for a dime. Good coffee. And a free refill.”
“Then I’d suggest you go down there.”
